Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  By sinking into her own mind she was connected with the dominating darkness out there, and with the fathomless galactic swirl. Inside the mind was all existence and attempting to observe and track the movements inside a mind enabled her, she believed, to be much more closely connected with the cosmos which was made of what she was made of. Was that not a purpose? Maybe the mind was the microcosm of the universe and its intertwined messages, its infinite secrets of space and time and motion as unlimited as the vastness outside. There was some relief in thoughts like these.

  But for the external world she lived in Natasha knew that was not enough and to the building of a new world for herself and Marcelle in their new home she applied herself with all the energy she could call on.

  She painted feverishly. She used oils, bright colours, reds and yellows in particular, paint slashed onto the surface with bold violence. Abstract though they were these paintings seemed to be moving also towards shapes recognisably cosmic – spirals, whorls, black holes . . . she was convinced this was new and strong and had to be seen. There were a few small galleries in the Richmond area which she intended to approach if the gallery just off the West End in which Victoria showed her paintings turned her down. It felt good to think of herself as a woman of action. Joseph had over-protected her, she thought, and consequently enfeebled her.

  The novel had been accepted and was on its unhurried road to publication. Yet she decided that poetry was more important. Like painting, she ought never to have put it aside. Joseph’s novel writing had been too strong an influence. Poetry, she thought, was how words could be best arranged, feelings and ideas most memorably expressed, human nature divined.

  She returned for a while to teach at the Barn Church Nursery School even though Marcelle had moved on to the recently built junior school less than five minutes’ walk away. She made friends with the Kew bookseller who was much attracted to her. She looked after his shop on occasions when he needed to be away on a buying trip. He said that the arrangement could be put on a more regular basis whenever she felt like doing so, but she did not follow it up.

  Most visibly of all though, partly to show Joseph she could, was her success in forming a new circle. Her former friends in Kew were still close but, as if she wanted to show unquestionable proof of her new independence, her house became a meeting place for a number of artists or those aspiring to be artists. Natasha uncharacteristically, Joe thought, decided to embrace the current interest in Indian culture and mantras would be chanted, scented candles lit as they sat on the floor in a circle, cannabis would be smoked, hands linked. Those who attended what became soirees spoke of her Eastern perception and of being at the heart of things.

  Joseph came across this new circle one Sunday evening when he brought Marcelle back rather later than usual. He resented them, all of them. He resented them being in Natasha’s house. He was jealous of these strangers being so close to his wife. He hated the feeling they gave off that he was something of an intruder and certainly an outsider. He found it hard to cope when Natasha merely looked up, glanced at him, brought Marcelle into the circle, turned back to her company and let him stay or go as he pleased. He left the house in a confusion of anger. Why were they in that house? What did they all do there? Why was he so out of it?

  On the train he tried to calm down and told himself he had no right to these feelings and vowed that he would not reveal them to his analyst but of course he did.

  Natasha pencil-sketched Joseph obsessively, usually late at night, in her bedroom, propped up with pillows, not even courting sleep. Always his face. And then she would let herself be drawn down, pulled into those scarcely lit zones on the ocean floor of the mind, plunged at first with relief into the seduction of unoccupied territory.

  ‘She lets Marcelle run wild,’ Ellen said. ‘The front window’s left wide open and she comes in through that instead of the door. So do all her friends and they run about shouting and laughing up and down the stairs and in and out without a word being said to check them.’

  ‘Why should they be checked?’ Sam smiled. ‘It sounds like a kid’s paradise.’

  ‘They shouldn’t just be let do as they want.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘You always take her side.’

  ‘Hang on. One thing at a time.’

  ‘There’s something overexcited about Marcelle and whatever you say it worries me.’

  ‘She’s lively, that’s all. She’s always been lively . . . What about Natasha?’

  ‘She never stops talking about Joseph. At one point I thought she was blaming me for the way he was but I couldn’t follow her. I had made Joseph like he was towards women, she said. She’s getting hard to follow sometimes. Funny smells everywhere. She should have that back seen to properly.’

  Ellen paused.

  ‘She wants him back so badly but the way she’s going about it . . . Anyway, I told her she was Number One to us. Whoever, whatever, she’s always Number One to us.’

  Joe invited Tim and Sarah, his new wife, to Hampstead for the evening. They began in the Flask, a pub frequented by a jostle of writers and bohemians he hoped would show off his area to advantage. Tim offered no comment while Helen and Sarah found a couple of seats at a table and talked to each other as if they met here regularly, Joe thought. He wanted to move up to the Cruel Sea, a pub which could boast serious stars, but Tim insisted on buying another round in the Flask and pub time ran out.

  They crossed the High Street, went into one of the little lanes that knitted the old centre of the village together and arrived at the Villa Bianca, an Italian restaurant Joe considered the best in the area. In the short distance between pub and restaurant Joe unloosed an accolade to Hampstead, hyperbolic and hyper-tense as if his reputation depended on proving to Tim the outstanding qualities of the place in which he lived.

  The waiter shook Joe’s hand which reassured him inordinately and showed them to the bay-window table which he had requested.

  ‘Where is it?’ said Sarah.

  ‘We didn’t trust the Ladies’ in the Flask,’ said Helen.

  ‘It’s a pub with character,’ said Tim, nodding at Joe, ‘a real pub, a pub with a history. Women have no sense of history.’

  ‘A man’s pub,’ said Sarah. ‘A pub with funny ideas about women’s little needs. They’d probably have made us stand up to do it.’

  ‘Upstairs on the left,’ said Joe.

  Tim watched them. ‘A blonde and brunette can never be bet,’ he muttered as the two attractive young women walked through the restaurant and, after a backward glance, strode up the stairs. ‘A new breed,’ he said. He looked around and leaned towards Joe. ‘Speaking of . . . Natasha phoned up two days ago. She wanted to see me. Immediately if not sooner!’

  ‘And?’ Joe provided the dramatic punctuation Tim needed.

  ‘We had tea in Brown’s.’

  ‘And ...?’

  ‘And,’ another glance around, ‘she tore me off a strip. She said I was responsible for the way you were. She said I had corrupted you. No kidding! Not just me – him – Edward – the poet – the two of us, had led you astray, and filled your head with cosmopolitan cynicism you couldn’t handle and because you were so innocent you believed in it. She said we had taken no account of who you really were but just, what was it? ‘idly undermined’ you because you were such a plum target. Bad enough, Joe my friend, bad enough. But tea in Brown’s is the afternoon rendezvous for the hushed voices of the English upper middle classes with a peppering of aristocrats at their most discreet. Even the clock whispers. And Natasha really let loose. Teacups were raised to shield faces. She belted it out! You had been corrupted!’

  ‘Belted what out?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Just talking.’

  ‘Ah! Men’s talk. Shall we leave the Males and go to powder our noses one more time?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Tim stood up and fussed with the chairs. Joe smiled and tried to push away what Tim had said. Corrupted? Clearly Tim thought of i
t as a comical encounter but Joe imagined the extremes that had driven Natasha to do it and he curled up with shame that he was part of what had brought her to this. The conversation around the table went on, largely driven by Tim. The women were more friendly more quickly than had ever been the case with Natasha (who would not, he thought, have liked Sarah). Helen, later in the meal, talked about her latest programme, which was to examine the origins of the Cold War. During all of it Joe spent the time thinking over why Natasha had done what she had done and what that said about her state of mind.

  Had she done it to strike out at those she considered her enemies? Yet they were Joe’s friends and always friendly to her. It might be that her analyst was now trying to move her even more deeply into Joe’s life; to do that, she had to root out those closest to him – but why? What wound would that heal? Tim and Edward were at the very least OK. They could be cynical but no more so than many others and both of them had a kindly side, Joe thought, which he and Natasha had experienced. And why ‘corrupt’? She would not have chosen the word carelessly. How had he been corrupted? What was it that she so strongly believed had been lost, a loss that had been instrumental in disrupting their marriage, staining whatever he had been? ‘Poor Joseph,’ he could hear her say, ‘Poor Joseph,’ and it maddened him.

  They ate Italian, although both Helen and Sarah began with prawn cocktails, and praises were sung for the grilled vegetables, the ravioli, the penne, the zucchini, the Chianti, the ambience, the service and the guitarist who played and sang Neapolitan songs. Toasts in sambuca, black coffee, arrivederci and onto the street.

  ‘Great,’ said Tim. ‘My shout next time. Great! And the girls seem to have clicked.’

  ‘We girls are off to the Dorchester to see what we can pick up,’ said Sarah.

  ‘We went to the Dorchester two nights ago,’ said Tim, swaying gently in the little lane. ‘Into the bar. Prostitutes? It was a convention! I tell you.’

  ‘He fancied some of them,’ said Sarah. ‘I had to drag him into the restaurant. Thanks, Joe, lovely night. See you soon, Helen. Come on, Tim, taxi time.’

  ‘What can I do?’ said Tim. ‘I am under her heel.’

  ‘Least said the better,’ said Sarah and she linked arms with Helen and walked towards the arch which led to the High Street.

  ‘One thing,’ said Tim. ‘Seriously. She, Natasha, she thinks you’re going to come back to her. She says it’s only a matter of time. Well?’

  ‘I want to,’ Joe said. ‘Sometimes I sort of feel I’ve not really left her. Not really.’

  ‘But you have. You and Helen. Helen and you. You have. Sexual Chemistry.’

  ‘It’s not like that. Well, it is like that, but it isn’t just like that, not . . .’

  ‘You have to make your mind up, my friend. The sooner the better. Take it from me. Now then, as the man said, arrivederci.’

  Joe and Helen waited with them until a taxi turned up, waved them off and then, his arm around her shoulder, they walked back to his house.

  ‘Sarah’s good fun!’ said Helen. ‘What was Tim talking to you about?’

  ‘Natasha,’ said Joe. ‘He was talking about Natasha.’

  ‘It must have been painful,’ said Helen and paused and then, ‘Sarah’s a copy writer in an advertising agency. She’s very funny about the men,’ and she laughed, recollecting what Sarah had said.

  Fortunately it was Joe who picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello.’ The voice was uncertain.

  ‘Natasha!’

  Joe looked across the room at Helen who was lying on the sofa, making notes from Randolph Churchill’s book on his father. She did not, or did not want to, understand his look.

  ‘Have you some time to talk? A little time.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Yes.’

  Again he looked across at Helen. She smiled and then read on.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes. I’m alone. It’s fine. We can talk. I’m alone.’

  Now it was Helen whose look sought him out. He nodded, covered the mouthpiece with his free hand and mimed apologies. She gathered her notes and the book, without undue speed.

  ‘Are you sure it’s . . . ?’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m just getting a cigarette.’ He reached for a cigarette. ‘Just a moment.’ Helen went out. ‘Lighting it. There we are. How are you?’

  ‘Are you sure you’re alone?’

  ‘Certain! How’s Marcelle?’

  ‘Your lovely daughter gets better day by day. She is a delight. She misses you.’

  ‘And I miss her.’

  ‘Yes . . . Joseph, Ross and Margaret are having a party on Saturday evening and we have been invited. I’ve not wanted to go with you to the other parties but this one I want to go to and with you.’

  ‘Yes. Good. This Saturday?’

  ‘The invitation came here some time ago but I could not make up my mind. Now I have.’

  Joe and Helen had planned to go out with Peter and the gang.

  ‘Could I ring you back?’

  ‘. . . I’d rather you decided now, Joseph.’ Her voice was low, tired, needy.

  ‘Of course I’ll come. I had something. I’ll cancel. Of course I’ll come.’

  ‘I would like us to arrive together. Marcelle is staying overnight with Anna. Could you be here at about seven o’clock?’

  ‘Seven o’clock.’

  ‘Thank you. I do thank you. You are not alone, are you?’

  ‘Yes. No. No, I’m not.’

  ‘Poor Joseph. I will see you on Saturday evening.’ She waited a moment or two and then put down the telephone.

  Joe felt eviscerated. Her stricken gentleness had crushed him. Helen wouldn’t mind, would she? She had said something the other day about the limits of patience but he had not really taken it in. Now he did . . .

  Natasha took four painkillers with a sip of whisky to ease her back.

  The next step, the doctor said, would be surgery. But painkillers and willpower could do wonders for the short term . . .

  She put on a dress which Joseph had bought her two years previously. It was at the height of the time when he wanted to buy her expensive clothes and see her in things he himself liked. It would have been churlish to deny him the pleasure but it was an act of loyalty on her part. The clothes were usually unsuitable. But this rather full dress, off the shoulder, satin, well cut, with something of the eighteenth century about it, suited her now, she thought, much better than when it had been purchased. Perhaps a slight but decisive turn of fashion had lowered its status and in doing so revealed its charm. And she was thinner now.

  She felt like a character in a Russian novel fated to go to a ball. She put on a necklace and then took it off. The dress was sufficiently elaborate. She put on a little make-up to mask the severe whiteness of her face and brushed back her hair. Natasha had never been vain. It was Joseph who had a weakness for mirrors. But this time she did look at herself intently as if looking into a well, seized for the moment by superstition, hoping some message would come back to her from her image.

  ‘You look lovely,’ Joseph said. ‘I’m pleased you’re wearing that dress. You look really lovely.’

  She was about to mock the surprise in his tone but she desisted.

  ‘What beautiful flowers. Nobody else would bring me flowers like these.’

  They stood in the front room which Natasha had neatened to his taste and lit with candles to hers. We are as awkward as a new courting couple, Natasha thought.

  ‘I’ll put them in water.’

  Joseph was glad that she left the room. He needed a few moments alone. Her hair, fiercely swept back like Shelley, her shadowy form in the uneven illumination of the few candles, the fragility, the aura of yearning solitude had taken him back to Shillingford to their first encounter, to the woman silhouetted against the fire. The memory was so strong it produced a physical effect and he felt a convulsion in his throat, a pressure in his eyes threatening tears. How could it have come to this? How ha
d it come to this?

  She entered bearing the large ruby-petalled roses and offered them to him.

  ‘The scent,’ she said, ‘is so rich.

  ‘I bought some whisky,’ she said. She held up a quarter-bottle. ‘I’ve already taken a little but there is plenty left for you. I thought we should have a drink together before we left.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as she poured. ‘Enough! I’ll be drunk before we get there.’

  ‘You look very handsome tonight, Joseph. Much better in that plain black suit. More like a man. Sauté.’ She raised her glass.

  ‘A la vôtre,’ he said.

  ‘I should not have teased you so much about your French,’ she said.

  ‘I asked for it. I usually do.’

  ‘That is because you take risks. Big, small, unnoticeable sometimes except to someone who studies you; but risks all the same.’

  Joseph was moved. When she paid him compliments although his gestures shrugged them off they gave him a support available nowhere else.

  ‘The room’s different from . . . when I last saw it . . . with you and your friends.’

  Natasha waved her cigarette in the air, a small dismissive gesture, but enough to dissolve at once all Joseph’s agitation.

  ‘I’ve almost enough paintings for an exhibition.’

  ‘That’s great. Congratulations. Can I see them?’

  ‘Not yet. Not now. Let’s just be here.’

  Natasha did not want to leave Joseph, who seemed more open than he had done for months. It was almost as it had been at the start, she thought. There was a bottle of wine when the whisky ran out. Just to be with him, without interference, without his deadlines and her distress, without Marcelle and the pressure of Helen, just to be . . . To sit here, she thought, and let time knit them closer together, to begin the healing, that would answer.

  ‘We’d better be off,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly eight o’clock.’